April 30, 2005 “” When first published, in 1984, Fred Gardiner’s book, Ten Bike Tours in and Around Toronto, broke new ground by encouraging Torontonians to consider the long-distance bike ride as a form of recreation that almost anyone could participate in. Thousands of people who had not previously thought of their bicycle as a way to get to the provincial parks or conservation areas in the Toronto hinterland bought the book and took the tours. As Mr. Gardiner puts it, “It is not unusual now for me to see other cyclists when I am out on a day-trip or an overnighter, but it sure was in 1984. I like to think that my little book was at least partially responsible for that change.”

Twenty years later, Lost City Press continues to receive requests for this title, which has been out-of-print since the late nineties. Happily, an updated version is in the works and will be available in June 2005. Mr. Gardiner has been busy going over the old routes to see how well they hold up. “You do have to go a little further to get that I’m-out-of-the-city feeling,” he reports, “but it is still there and I’m excited by the possibility of adding a couple of new routes to Ten Bike Tours. The Martin Goodman Trail, for instance, didn’t even exist when I wrote the first edition. Bike paths were few and far between and while there are a lot more of them now, the real fun for me still consists of loading up my bike with camping gear and heading out-of-town for a couple of days.”

Lost City Press is also experimenting with making the book available on the Internet. As each tour is completed, it will be uploaded to the Lost City Press website, where readers will be able to download it in PDF format. “That means that if you are only interested in one or two of the tours,” explains Mr. Gardiner, “you can just go to the website, click on the ones you want and have them delivered to your email address. Of course a lot of people will still prefer to have a printed version and that’s good too. It’ll be out in June.” The print version of Ten Bike Tours will be sold at selected Toronto bookstores and Lost City Press will provide a list of location as they become available on its website at www.geocities.com/lostcity20032002.

Ten Bike Tours provides readers with a few short, warm-up tours to places like the Leslie Street Spit and the Scarborough Bluffs before encouraging them to head further to Kleinburg, Terra Cotta, and Sibbald Point. Four of the tours are overnighters, which means carrying a tent and sleeping bag, or putting yourself up in a local motel. Other destinations include the Hockley Valley and Holland Marsh, the Sharon Temple, Emily Provincial Park, and the Royal Botanical Gardens near Hamilton.

Lost City Press will be making the first print copies of the new edition available at this spring’s Toronto Small Press Book Fair. Visitors will be able to meet the author, get a signed copy of Ten Bike Tours and look over LCP’s other publications. The Small Press Book Fair takes place on Saturday, May 21, 2005, at Trinity St. Paul’s Centre, 427 Bloor Street West, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. More information about the fair is available at www.torontosmallpressbookfair.org.

Fred Gardiner is a Toronto writer and graphic artist who has published five books. While working as a bicycle courier for five years in the mid-eighties, he used his bicycle to explore most of southern Ontario. Two summers ago, he wrote A Trip Round Lake Ontario on a Bicycle, and in 1993, produced The Freewheelin’ Thomas Hardy, a small book of bikes tours that showed readers how to visit the real scenes in Thomas Hardy’s novels the same way the great man himself did, on a bicycle. Mr. Gardiner is also a musician, a father, and a knowledgeable fundraiser. He has occasionally spent extensive periods of time in England and once rode from Scarborough to Oxford on what he likes to call The Great Real Ale Tour.

Book Info:
Ten Bike Tours in and Around Toronto
By Fred Gardiner
Length: Approx. 53 pages
Price: $7.95
Publication date: June 2005

To request a review copy send your name, the publication title, your full mailing address, and email address to:
Mr. Fred Gardiner
Lost City Press
613-550 Ontario St.
Toronto, ON
M4X 1X3

Email: lostcity20032002@yahoo.com